Understanding the Twitter API v1.1
APIs are both a blessing and a curse. Application Programming Interfaces make it much easier to gather data from services such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and define exactly what data the company wants, and does not want, you to have. Unfortunately, companies set rate limits on accessing their APIs in order to control the frequency (and therefore, the amount) of data that can be harvested. They have also been known to radically alter their APIs from one version to the next, thus resulting in a great deal of code rewrites for all efforts dependent on the original API. Twitter's large API change from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1 offers a cautionary tale.
Twitter offers three main APIs: the Search API, the REST API, and the Streaming API. The search API gives us a programmatic method that makes queries to Twitter in order to retrieve historical content, namely tweets. The REST API offers access to Twitter's core features, including timelines, status updates...